From what I hear, most collaboration vendors are trying to tackle this problem, some by making the desktop edition even more proprietary (guess who), others by trying to improve RTE’s. Well, there is another vendor, one that doesn’t have a collaboration platform of its own, whose product (Evernote) is quite relevant to this issue…

What is your workspace vision?

I have been pondering about the competing notions of “workspace” implicit to different collaboration products and companies. Here are a few:

• The ultra-unified collaboration and communications story (i.e., Microsoft’s, Cisco’s, IBM’s) – All of these visions start from the pragmatic assumption that the Microsoft Office apps are around, and will be around, as the standard desktop environment, and then imagine the workspace as this virtual space where people meet to collaborate around the artifacts they have produced in Office. Emphasis: mostly private authoring, with a collaborative icing on the cake. Not surprisingly, Microsoft promotes this vision of the workspace where you and I meet to discuss a PowerPoint deck you produced, and in order to work on that .ppt file, we would use chat, SMS, IM, VoIP, conferencing to bring in Mary’s opinion, and so on. That workspace vision is very natural to people who still spend forty or more hours a week in conservative organizations dominated by Windows, where each PC comes with Office and Explorer (and practically nothing else outside of the occasional VPN), and where most of the work is done individually, by individuals. On the other hand, if you are an occasional user of Office (most SMB’s, small virtual teams, most creatives, and so on), and you have come to dread using it because of its over-featured characteristics, you might found that scenario very limiting. Further, even if you are a frequent Office user, you may (like me) fear the sheer accumulation of synchronous and asynchronous communications modalities (phone, VoIP  phones, IM, SMS, email, voice mail, presence-enabled clients, automated assistants trained to find you, and so on; I don’t know about you, but I already have more interruptions that I can handle, and more communication modalities that are comfortable to keep under control… So, in a nutshell, Office-artifact-centric collaboration workspaces are a natural, possibly more productive, extension of their networked desktops of today for intensive Office users, and somehow convoluted and overwhelming to people who are not, or who have their quota of interruptions already full. SharePoint supports, creates and maintains archetypical Office-artifact-centric workspace. Because SharePoint (both WSS and MOSS) are here to stay, the Office-centric workspace model is sure to get a long list of adopters for years to come (we will discuss in another posting whether that is good, bad or neutral for collaboration progress);
• The collaborative-artifact-centric workspace (Atlassian, WordPress, most open source CMSs), which is harder to find usually because the workspace concept itself is downplayed (but still there in the form of “spaces”), where users collaboratively work on documents they collectively produce, whether the collaboration has an opportunity to start from inception of the document (wikis), following a central thread of postings (blog) or triggered by “questions” or “issues” whose resolution is important to many people (forums). Whatever the publishing model, this workspace model does not put so much emphasis on people talking on the phone, holding conferences or sending and receiving SMS and email, all while they write on the wiki, and therefore adoption patterns for this type of workspace are quite dynamic and persistent. The collaborative content is the center of attention, and users mostly are something close to a second thought. Atlassian’s Confluence, for example, is a great example for this modality of workspaces, as are WordPress MU for enterprise blogs. Before you object, telling me that SharePoint also supports the modalities above, I must preemptively answer that wiki, blog and discussion support in SharePoint is minimal, primitive and barely enough to make that statement of support, and also that despite the accumulation of several servers brought about by MOSS and the layer after layer of functionality (user profiles, SSO management, etc.) it still remains an Office-artifact-centric workspace manager (I have even stronger opinions about the usability of the communication pieces, but that will wait for another occasion). Let’s just agree for now that collaborative-artifact-centric workspaces are characterized by strong focus on collaboratively produced (and immediately auto-published) documents, with users as a somehow secondary-priority object, which is there mostly to create, serve and maintain those collaborative documents. To make justice to Confluence, I must say that there seems to be a recognition in Atlassian’s part that users and their own personal experiences should be more relevant, but the transformation has not yet completely taken place. In any case, this type of workspaces are specially attractive and productive for technical users (whether technical means computer-savvy or some other specialty); that is the case for many reasons, prime between them that collaborative documents are usually much more complex structurally than flat Office documents because of hyperlinking (Office supports links but it doesn’t make sense to put links to files that are in your private disk, or have to go to SharePoint to find the URL of something else – not for now), macros and plugins that allow the representation of many types of objects in the content (from workflow, to relational data, to media, to…), and also the fact t hat many people together think much better than a single one, and therefore the collectively produced documents they originate are much richer and interesting. On the other hand, this type of workspaces tend to irritate Office-only users (a large percentage of today’s users), for whom bold is control-B, tables are (a) a menu on the top right and (b) indispensably finely tuned and precisely colored, titles and other styles are carefully crafted by font, size, font style, etc. It would be unfair to say that those things cannot be done in this type of workspaces: the problem is that those things are done differently, and asking people to use a browser-based Rich Text Editor or textile (*bold*) is already asking too much. I am amazed when I talk to collaboration experts and some minimize the importance and size of this population, as if it were made of sick people, and I remind them that (a) at least 4 out of 5 CEO’s fall in the category, as well as an even higher percentage of white collar personnel and (b) many people learn to use a computer by using Office applications… and never need to go any further;
• The user-centric workspace, where the focus is carefully kept in the user itself, by “personal workspaces” containing artifacts related to anything that that user has going on at the time. Those artifacts may include blog posting, discussions, Office documents, and any other type of document and/or media, as well as tokens and avatars of other users, brought into the personal workspace by their participation on any of these things going on for that user. A very popular representative of this vision is JIVE Software’s Clearspace, as well as IBM’s Connections (when put together with other IBM products).  A typical landing page for a user-centric workspace is the personal workspace, where the user finds notifications about updates to documents she may be working on, articles published on areas she has interest on, users she is friend with who may have new contributions, and so on; as the user follows any of those links, she will enter other people’s workspaces, as well as group projects, and in the process land on content documents, either privately or collaboratively produced. User-centric workspaces have the attraction of focusing (by definition and architecture) on the things that matter to each user. It is not uncommon for any two different users to have totally, radically different views of the same collaboration hub, because each one of them configured his/her private space to show precisely what they wanted to see and do. Even when the notion of workspace is radically different, social networking collaboration hubs complement document-centric ones quite well. Except for issues of Single Sign On, Unified Search and simplified access to content across environments, there is usually no procedural or process-oriented regimentation to maintain, because the content-centric and the user-centric workspaces serve the same user at different times, for different purposes; I may use my social networking site first thing in the day, to plan my day and update my knowledge about things I care, just to continue one of the threads in it into a content-centric collaboration where I may work for hours in MS Office, or vice-versa, and my interest will drive me naturally to the correct workspace hub. The characteristic of a user-centric workspace is, then, that the focus of attention for the user is her own state of work and collaborations, as well as other users that are actively participating in them; only from there do users usually access documents to work on them. Another strong typifier of such products is that other users, as well as the networks they define (networks, team, buddies, etc.) are at least equally visible, and finally, that such user visibility brings with it a corresponding highlight on user interactions themselves (and in most cases even more) than content objects (there are other technical differentiations of such products, but I am concentrating on Workspaces for the moment).

Of course, the abstractions above are separated by thin and ambiguous lines, and you can expect to see them crossed constantly by products. But they are also good tools of analysis: I have found that most requirements documents for collaboration products quickly zero into these variables.

Workspace patterns

So, we can see that several patterns emerge as we differentiate philosophies of workspaces:

I have productively worked with (and in most cases deployed across an enterprise) most of the modalities above, and several combinations thereof, and found them all attractive and productive, each one on its own capabilities and special applications. I have also found that any product exhibiting any combination of the parameters above can be a productivity sinkhole when used in the wrong manner; that is the case because all of the products I mentioned above as archetypical of one modality or the other also manage to “almost do” what makes the others archetypical as well: using them in that “almost as good as” manner is an almost certain disaster and waste of time.

The gray zone between private and public content work

I have also found that  there is a corner of my way of working (with emphasis on my, just because I don’t know if its yours as well) that is not covered by any of the modalities outlined above, and that is the corner where private note-taking overlaps with online collaboration. When I tally the time I spend working on the computer, I realize that a major chunk of my time is spent clipping, gathering, writing, annotating, organizing content by myself, on my desktop, privately, even when the content I clip, gather, write, annotate and organize comes from the web, email, wikis, etc. and is, in most cases destined to become part of a collaboration.

The problem is, when the moment comes to use that content in a collaborative fashion, a major usability fracture emerges: that of re-purposing the “private”, carefully integrated multi-source content into on-line collaborations I may be working on. I call this corner “the moment of taking my brain store public”, and if you have attempted it, you hate it as well:

That’s why I have been an avid user of OnFolio, until Microsoft bought the company and killed the product, then OneNote  (until I settled on Evernote for Windows), then Notebook, Omnioutliner, Caboodle and about ten other apps in the Mac (until I settled on Webstractor, a fantastic app that proceeded to become unsupported when the vendor died and immediately proceeded to bomb while saving in OS X 10.5), then several notetakers on my S60 phones, and so on… All of them imposed the heavy price of making the private notes public that I described above…

Well, NO MORE! Now there is a new Evernote for Mac, combined with a new hosted synchronization model, that I believe will shock the world, and in the process help solve a significant part of the pain caused by one of the discontinuities that has most troubled collaboration products (and a big hush-hush for those products, except for IBM who has a relatively slim advantage in the area): the chasm between offline and online content. Whether because you travel on site and have no access to the VPN from your customer’s network, or because you spend two hours working on the train getting to and from the office and home, or spend too much time in airport, the fact is, your private knowledge and your collaborative knowledge are sitting in different places, one on your machine, the other online… and you are always bound to need the one you have no access to!

Evernote to the rescue, rocking the world

I hope you tried or used Evernote at some point on Windows. Talk about a neat, clean, superbly designed product. It basically sat in the status bar, ready to be invoked at any time, and ready to receive web clips, copy/pastes, selected chunks of graphics and/or text, hand-written notes (switching to hand-writing if you were using a tablet),and so on. You never needed to save, if you clipped it or wrote it or annotated it, it was permanent. Then, you could highlight, add to it, delete, edit, etc., and still love it more.

If that wasn’t enough, Evernote had something that looked almost science fiction, even for OCR-savvy users: it would process your handwritten notes, or pictures of signs, or whatever pixel-based, and turn them into searchable text! Did I mention that the search in Evernote was lightning fast already? I am sure you are logving it by now… No? Ok, consider this: tagging of notes, categories, a ticker-tape metaphor for chronological display, templates, c’mon, you’ve GOT to love it! OK, OK, you could buy it for $39, do you love it now? No?

If no, it maybe because there were a couple of problems with the Windows version:

1. Did not run on Mac (Ouch!)
2. DId not do much (actually, ANYTHING) to solve the private/public thing…

So, it was still by far the best note taking app in the world, but it fell short…

Until I found out about the Mac Evernote beta. The mac version is, as anything Mac, sexier and neater than its Windows counterpart (albeit a little less functional yet). But hey, it solves the multi-computer thing (because there is also a version for Linux and phones –sort of). That is quite nice, but the private-public thing…

YES, IT SOLVES THAT PROBLEM TOO! And it does it through a feature that makes it infinitely more powerful than it was before: a hosted model through which notes can be synchronized between an online store and different computers, accessed online at any time, and SHARED with other users online as well.

Wow, are you starting to see the possibilities? And… did I mention that the online version of a note you see on your browser is identical to that in your computer, the one where graphics, tables and other niceties looked so well? Or that you can also edit it ONLINE? Or that the client version runs on Windows, Macs, phones and Linux? Or that you can send a quick email with notes from your phone and they will become notes? What about pics in online-synchronized notes being automatically tagged with their contained, searchable text?

The possibilities for this product are UNBELIEVABLE, and I hope you see what I see… Let me outline possible scenarios:

• Evernote decides to sell the server as an enterprise collaboration server, where people share some of their notebooks (Evernote’s personal workspace metaphor), and enable collaborative content (all that lays in the way is a simple authentication and granular access control mechanism);
• Remember that notebooks can contain ANY KIND of media, including voice annotations (directly from your phone), videos, etc, each one of them procured in the device that makes sense to you in the moment. This is intrinsically more UNIFIED than anything in the mega-monolithic UCC vision by Microsoft… with one millionth of the footprint, and leveraging personal devices without heavy weight IT budgets!
• Now that your ultra-flexibly produced private notes are online, with nice formatting, graphics, and such, why would you use convoluted mechanisms for attaching documents, then referring to them? Yes, there will still be Office content, but I can guarantee you that many, like me, will get rid of most needs for Office and STILL share nicely organized and formatted content online. I will spend a large amount of time taking light-weight but rich-enough notes, knowing that if I am online my content is synchronized as often as I want, and if I am not it will when I get back on line (and that I carry a fairly actualized copy in the meanwhile).
• Evernote notebooks will keep adding richer and richer mechanisms for clipping, annotating, etc. I can see a point coming where it can match the mind-boggling fidelity of clipping that Webstractor used to have, and the PDF-to-RTF correctness that other Mac products have, and the intra-page linking beauty of Voodoo Pro, etc. The richer the desktop mechanism, the richer the online verison will become, without additional pain of any sort. All of it automatically synchronized…

The perfect condiment

I realize that my excitement may come as out of place to most of my audience. Unless you have worked, and DO work, with several collaboration platforms, on a couple of computers or more, you may think I am exaggerating: even if you have experience note taking you have not experienced the pain of transferring to online collaboration platforms. Yes, if you use .Mac you will share the excitement for good synchronization (which is not a trivial problem to address any way), but still… only if you have experienced the pain of sharing your private notes in a collaboration platform you will sympathize.

Now, if you DO use at least one workspace-based collaboration product, and you DO take notes, clippings, cut-paste, etc., try it and stick to it until it starts synchronizing. Once it does that, try installing the client on another computer. Now share your notes… YOU ARE HOOKED, this is an awesome thing.

Now, there is a possible company play I don’t care much about, which is Evernote trying to become the world center for all notes (As you read above, what excites me is the possibility of a server you can acquire for internal collaboration). Well, not less than a week ago the company posted user quotas (limits) of 40 MB per month. For a company that (presumably) wants to be the Google of notes, the number is a real joke… but the potential for an enterprise collaboration move is still there, and that is still cool…

Getting a beta for Mac

You can go to the Evernote website and request the beta. The problem is, it took me a couple days for me to receive the user ID I need for the hosted component. That tells me beta subscription is quite limited… but I have 18 invitations left from my membership, drop me a comment if you want one, and I will send it out until I run out of them. You’ll love Evernote, and you’ll like me for it.  :)

Nota Bene: [Correction] When I wrote the original article above, I blamed Evernote for leaving previous users of the stand-alone Windows note-taking app hanging dry… Well, it turns out that I was wrong, and I am happy to report it (See Phil Libin’s comment). My apologies for the short-lived slander  :)

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Evernote: new collaboration modality emerging or just note taking?

•  Huge advances – Not a buzzword any more, collaboration will be one of the most important IT concerns for 2008, and has fierce grass-root adoption at the consumer level;
• Confusion – Now that it’s proven as a valid concern, collaboration has been wrapped together with too many other concerns, specially some coming from the communications side, and it’s easy to lose perspective of what is real (collaboration) and what is fodder (the always-hyper-connected workforce, communicating in twenty different channels and modalities at the same time, and at the same time having time to collaborate productively).

Here goes a timed perspective, from my eyes and memory, of some of what has happened in these last eleven years.

1997 — Technical Collaboration… uhhh?

In late 1997, as a VP of Marketing for Starbase, I remember customers’ and media’s skepticism and resistance when we “audaciously” used the new term of technical collaboration to describe StarTeam; “Since when is source control a collaboration issue?”.

People who were not users, and did not “get” StarTeam, would look at the threaded discussions that were part of the product, and their eyes would glaze, trying to understand what the heck was a discussion doing in the middle of so much source code. Some times, we could tell those people “Look, you can tie together the source you produce and change, with your discussions and comments about it, then you can use those discussions as threads to understand changes”, and in one out of five cases people would get it.

The same would happen with tasks, project management, and other “superfluous” team collaboration mechanisms that were surfaced through the product’s user interface; people expected a technical product to be… well… technical, and “collaboration” was not something techies did. Then again, that was 1997, and “techies” were just coming out of generations of changing applications using COBOL, one copybook at a time… Perhaps all that was needed was time to go by?

2000 — Communities and Reputation Management

Fast-forward to 2000; collaboration had become hot, specially between developers. During a very short six months or so, I was assigned to try to help create one of the first hosted development environment for corporate and open source developers (yes, the two terms don’t make sense together, and that’s probably why it didn’t work out); the venture was a spin off Starbase, located in Scotts Valley.

Think about it, collective, hosted, collaborative development, all very progressive concepts, just at the dawn of open source… Who would say that collaboration had not arrived? 

Just before jumping on board of the new venture, I had been dabbling with my friend Pierre on the issues of Communities and Reputation Management (through a couple of early community portals called VoteZone and Grapevine respectively, both of them experimenting with community and reputation management strategies, both of them piloting the user-centered approach to content that has now come to be called social networking).

In the process, I had become first seduced by the potential of massive collaboration portals, then nauseated by the asinine waste of energy produced by anonymity and large clouds or flaming bozos and robots, and finally elated by the capability of good reputation management to maximize the first by controlling the second; all that remained was just for massive collaboration (now called social networking) to start happening, and new wonderful things to evolve from it… It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that reputation management was a basic pre-requisite to civil behavior online, in the way to online virtual societies… Right?

So, I thought that it would be a good idea to bring reputation management into the hosted development environment… It just made so much sense, considering the social outlook of hosted collaborative development!

Did the acceptance of technical collaboration bring about tolerance and understanding for reputation management? Did social concepts pile up neatly as bricks, or did each brick need to be justified on its own? Did I succeed? You would think so, but you couldn’t be further from the truth if you tried.

I remember bringing Pierre to our offices, so that he could discuss with the two leading technologists in the company (let’s call them Jason and Jeff, to simplify)… J&J, bright and progressive as they were, two bright kids who believed themselves to be ahead of the pack as it related to collaboration, cooperation, and the social potential of the Internet, spent two hours fighting against the idea, and never gave themselves a chance to understand it.

It was a really sad meeting to attend: for Pierre and I, having experienced the power of reputation management first hand, the discussion was not about whether it made sense, it was just how to make it happen as fast as humanly possible; a total no-brainer!  Anything else would be equal to a world where everybody uses the same mask, the same voice…

But J&J didn’t even want to understand what reputation management was about; collaboration was a sticky buzzword, anybody could see that it was a good thing, but nobody wanted to get into the details of how to enable it, and this reputation management thing sounded like it required true discipline and thinking… Collaboration couldn’t be that hard, could it?

In other words, collaboration had undergone a long journey, but only the buzzword had established itself as something that “made sense”. A few practitioners had developed working, vivid experiences, but they were at that point just anecdotal book material, stuff “that other people do”; nobody disputed the power of collaboration, but some people were still fired for trying to get it to work…

2005 — Communities, wikis and blog — The practitioners’ challenges

Another fast forward to 2005. As a brand-new consultant for a $1Bn software company, I am asked to put together a business initiative for a platform and business process to support a ”cloud” of external user communities (with a projected maximum number of over a hundred individual communities, most of them for users of a specific product, others clustered around specific industry issues important to the company’s customers).

The initiative was clearly articulated (I will summarize the most salient points in a separate posting), approved after 30 minutes of review by the executives… and then buried two or three levels below anybody who could give ANY meaning to the phrase “executive sponsorship”, the sine-qua-non of successful communities. 

Not surprisingly, while buried, not much progress was made in the communities front; but a few things started happening in a parallel front, internal collaboration, where I was kept busy  rolling out an internal R&D collaboration platform, using Atlassian’s Confluence wiki platform and Sharepoint.

Sputtering, with many vacillations, internal collaboration started to happen; many content structures and workflows were started, some of them dwindled, but some prospered, and soon the “breeze could be felt” as we moved towards the tipping point. Having been involved in several such projects in the previous few years, I must say that despite the lack of an internal collaborative culture, budgetary support or executive sponsorship, this tipping point came much faster, with fewer hiccups, and in an obviously more sustainable manner than previous ones, even when the preceding ones were better positioned in those three critical fronts (internal culture, resources and sponsorship).

Pure luck? Perhaps… After all, I always preferred to be lucky than good. But the key component, which was not there before, was the awareness about collaboration and web 2.0 on the part of the users, and a desire (almost an impatience) to give it a try. Collaboration had already sneaked into their collective subconscious, it wasn’t just something that could be done and was good, but rather something that was being done, and why shouldn’t they? I must clarify that  I am not talking about a leading bunch of bleeding-edge developers of web 2.0 platforms, but rather average corporate developers, mostly developing database applications, and IT operations management tools: as representative a sample as can be asked of the median US developer population. 

On the external collaboration front (communities), after months spent customizing JIVE Forums, doubtlessly the best community product available (and the one with the most robust reputation management functionality), so that it could manage hundreds of independent communities, things were still sputtering.

This was 2007, and I was asked to help revive the project; by then, ten years after we used “technical collaboration” at Starbase for the first time, and with collaboration shining always brighter and brighter, you could expect both projects (external and internal) to have been smooth sailing, mostly routine…After all, these are the times of collaboration, right?

Of course, you would be wrong again if you were too optimistic; but not by as much as before. Sure, “executive sponsorship” ended up becoming “lukewarm tolerance”; “hundreds” of communities shrunk to “a handful of very small groups” as soon as it became obvious that communities required corporate, executive and participant commitment; and most people didn’t even get it: just as I right this post, as an example, I got an email from somebody inside the company who has worked all along in the communities initiative, asking me to clarify –for the hundredth time in three years — when do people use a wiki, a blog, a forum, why, and what for… 

Yes, it wasn’t as great as expected. But on the other hand, thousands of page views a day on the knowledge base, close to a hundred individual contributions a day to the wiki, healthy metrics in all communities, and such, meant that despite apathy, internal politics and lack of direction people who want to collaborate found a way to do it, once they had the right tools and infrastructure.

One thing is for a company to have a “friendly” environment, another totally different is for it to have a “collaborative” one. But one thing is certain: take a friendly environment, make a few good collaboration tools available, and some collaboration hotspots WILL appear. And they did: pockets of collaboration started happening, brewing and interacting amongst themselves; collaborations started taking place, and nobody was surprised when it happened (or, more critical yet, challenged because of it).

Nota Bene: On the subject of “friendly vs. collaborative“, I believe that one of the most insidious challenges faced by enterprise collaboration is that executives in “friendly-culture companies”, who know nothing about collaboration, somehow believe that people in their company already do collaborate (“After all, this the most friendly company I know”), and because they think so they quickly reject the idea of investing on it (more on this in another posting).

In any case, between 2005 and 2007 I saw collaboration become part of the workplace landscape; actual people, inside a normal, perhaps just slightly more conservative environment than could be expected in a large company, where using collaboration day in and out as intuitively as they would use a phone. Just something you do, and of course, something you want to do with the best tools possible.

In those three years, I also grew the realization that *enterprise* was more than just a qualifier for collaboration, that it is its own thing, something related to collaboration but not just a flavor of it (I will write about that later). I saw many companies going through the process of implementing collaboration inside the enterprise, collaborated with several of them, and realized that it was just a matter of time (actually, a year or two) before it became as accepted as email is today…

2008 – The target keeps moving

This year (i.e., 2008) should be a record-breaking year for collaboration; everywhere I turn, I talk to companies where collaboration is the next big roll-out, taking place *now*, in 2008. 

Knowledge architects, managers and executives in companies that used to call me every few months trying to fetch new arguments and to convince themselves to get going, are now in advanced deployment of collaboration platforms and tools.

Collaboration went from niche activity (only for techies) to visionary business goal, to tolerated “fuzzy investment”, and it’s now entering the status of *basic need of all knowledge workers*. But somehow, in the process of becoming a standard fixture, it got a little fuzzier.

At first collaboration was about getting people to *work together* across geographic fractures, time zones and systems, *working together* was just that, sharing a few artifacts, creating temporarily permanent spaces where to contain the results of their work (even if it was a directory in a file server), looking at a common page together and calling it “state of things”.

Then, web 2.0 platforms such as forums (JIVE Community Server), blogs (WordPress), wikis (Confluence), social networks (Clearspace) started to hit, and collaboration started to be characterized by workspaces (permanenet or ad-hoc), “where” teams would collaborate (there is no real “where”, but it’s a “where” nonetheless), would create content together, discuss, enact simple workflows, log activities, perform simple GTD or small-group-agile-task-management, where attachments could be the report you were looking for, and you would find them by navigating a tag cloud, or by locating with some degree of effort the expert on that subject covered by that report, and so on.

The issue moved from what collaboration was to how to better combine all the different ways that knowledge workers do collaboration.

• Is it a blog, a forum, a wiki, a page, a portal or a database? YES
• Is it social, reputation driven, profile enabled, expert-locating, intranet, extranet or medianet? YES
• Is it work, is it play, is it conversation, is it social, or is it just a waste of time? YES
• Is it unified collaboration, unified communications, or unified collaboration and communications? YES

 Not surprisingly, the soup is confusing. A ferocious hype storm, fed by the chance to reap a chunk of the trillion dollar telco market by reinventing (retro-inventing?) telephony as data, is now converging with the very legitimate running train of collaboration.

The results of this hype confluence is, of course, more hype, more confusion, people talking about huge stacks of software, servers, network components and telephony layers as if they were a system (which they are not, they are just a soup of systems, but not organic in the sense that telephony has learned how to be).

Not surprisingly, early adopters will be burnt severely because of their optimism, but in the whole nobody cares, because the hype storm is raging.

It is dangerous for collaboration, a market that has grown slowly for so many years, solely because of its own merits (there were no IBM’s, Microsoft’s and Ciscos pushing wikis or collaboration up to 2006, were there?). It is dangerous because it is been attached to grandiose big-bang visions of complete technology stacks that go from the hardware all the way to the apps actual people use, and in all directions in the organization, to encompass all activities they conduct today (or may dream to conduct in the future).

Grandiose, all-encompassing visions are usually the fruit of megalomaniac egos (personal or corporate), just another twist in the world domination fantasy. Those small groups that laboriously, sometimes almost clandestinely, managed to create collaboration hot-spots, may see them extinguish as many IT drones fall under the seduction of “automatically managed presence”, “VoIP network self-optimization” and the like, and those drones start implementing pervasive and intrusive communication channels that few people need across all layers, start intertwining them with back-office applications (so that you can now have the immense pleasure of talking to a voice enabled server to try to explain to it that your access to some system is blocked), start bothering the hell out of everyone in the name of collaboration.

But it could be good, also, if communications modalities that people do use get seamlessly integrated into their collaboration workspaces. After all, clicking on my name where it appears under a posting of mine on a wiki, to send me a message immediately, seems to make sense, doesn’t it? It could be good if those that have not even given a chance to collaboration (those that reply with an email to a voice message all of the sudden find themselves doing it, not even knowing they are doing the collaboration thing.So, it’s confusion time. The right ingredients are there for hugely successful collaboration efforts, and also for huge failures (which will probably be blamed on the “inmaturity of collaboration” when boards need heads to chop after them).

Considering how much is at stake, I’ve decided I will start writing more posting about this issue, hopefully one a day, to try to clarify my own confusions and in the process help somebody as well. For now, let’s leave it at this precariously optimistic point, where eleven years of trying to enable and foster collaboration seem to start bearing fruit…

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Enterprise collaboration: huge advances, some confusion